The patent marketplace has expanded significantly as an increasing number of patents are being filed. In turn, the demand for patent intermediaries is also expected to grow. One channel of patent flow for patentees to realize revenue is patent out-licensing, which involves high risk and uncertainty and a consuming need for coordination. Most patent licensing studies have focused on licensing mo...

In this Article, we propose a way to improve the workings of the patent system. Unlike most extant reform proposals that focus on the USPTO and the Federal Circuit and the procedures they employ, our proposal is conceptual in nature. We introduce two new intellectual property forms—“quasipatents” and “semi-patents.” Both forms are designed to mitigate the social costs of traditional patents by ...

This paper addresses a method for customizing an English-to-Korean machine translation system from general domain to patent domain. The customizing method consists of following steps: 1) linguistically studying about characteristics of patent documents, 2) extracting unknown words from large patent documents and constructing large bilingual terminology, 3) extracting and constructing the patent...

The United States International Trade Commission has recently experienced a dramatic increase in patent infringement investigations under section sign 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930. In fact, the number of patent enforcement actions submitted to the ITC has nearly doubled in the last five years. Patent holders are selecting this forum because of its speedy proceedings and its ability to award br...

Patent application numbers grow exponentially in many industries, a phenomenon that has been linked to high fragmentation of patent ownership. Contradicting these findings and theoretical arguments, we show that such fragmentation is not a precondition for sudden and strong increases in patenting. We describe and analyze a patent portfolio race in an industry with highly concentrated patent own...

S | 48 An Agency Theory of Patent Law: Linking Innovators and Invention Users Richard Gruner Professor, John Marshall Law School Chicago, IL This article presents a reinterpretation of patent laws as components of agency relationships linking innovators and innovation users. In these relationships, patent rights substitute for privately negotiated contract terms tying the interests of persons w...

We introduce a two-armed bandit model to study firms’ incentives in choosing cooperative vs. noncooperative research when facing different market structures. Unlike previous literature on research joint ventures that generally assumes the certainty of success in R&D (possibly at an unknown date), we analyze R&D competition when the viability of R&D projects are also unknown but firms can update...

Patent pools do not correct all problems associated with patent thickets. In this respect, patent pools might not stop the outsider problem from striking pools. Moreover, patent pools can be expensive to negotiate, can exclude patent holders with smaller numbers of patents or enable a group of major players to form a cartel that excludes new competitors. For all the above reasons, patent pools ...

Information pertaining to the patent system is scattered not only across the patent domain, but also across other scientific and regulatory domains. In recent years, there has been an explosive growth in scientific and regulatory documents related to the patent system. In this project, the use of networks and network analyses is applied to an Information Retrieval (IR) problem in the patent dom...

A patent gives a patent holder (the “patentee”) the exclusive right to make, use, import, and sell his or her invention. The quid pro quo for obtaining a patent on an invention is disclosing in the patent how to make and use the invention. For this reason, a patent application must contain a detailed disclosure that teaches how to make and use the invention. Normally, this disclosure consists o...